ASUS Ares II Crossfire X review: the most extreme graphics card times two

Two overclocked Radeon HD 7970s on a single card

By Koen CrijnsMonday 28 January 2013 17:00

Introduction

Today we are taking a closer look at the most powerful graphics card ever created, the ASUS Ares II. While AMD never formally introduced the Radeon HD 7990 graphics card, a number of them have already become available. As if combining two Tahiti GPUs wasn't enough for ASUS, the manufacturer has now launched the ASUS Ares II which fuses two complete Radeon HD 7970s and is overclocked. ASUS claims it's the fastest graphics card they've ever developed, and they're right. So what happens when you put two of these ASUS Ares II cards in a PC? Read on to find out...

The original Ares card came out in 2010, at a time when the Radeon HD 5870 was the fastest single-GPU AMD graphics card. There was a dual-GPU card called the Radeon HD 5970 based on the same 3D chip, but to keep the energy consumption reasonable the clock speed was reduced. ASUS took a different approach, and create a true double 5870, costing around £1,000.

The Ares 2 is just as exclusive as the Ares was, and that's reflected by - let's be honest - the exorbitant price tag of about £1,199. ASUS is also only making 1,000 copies of this beast, and has equipped the Ares II with water cooling.

We were lucky enough to get our hands on two out of the 1,000 available Ares IIs, and put them through our tests to find out whether this really is the fastest graphics card ever made.